Flaherty Wines

In our small town in Chile, most people still shop the old-fashioned way. We buy produce at the produce market, meat at the butcher, bread at the bakery, and fish at the fishmonger. We do have modern supermarkets, and I really appreciate the Jumbo up in Los Andes (Italian pasta! Cheddar cheese! Arborio, Thai, and short-grained rice!), but they really are best for dry goods. For fresh local products, the small independent vendors are the way to go.

Take the fishmonger. We’re only an hour and a half from the coast, so when the fish is fresh, it’s really fresh. They restock on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Well, on Saturdays for sure, Thursdays mostly, and I’m not at all confident about Tuesdays. That means that Saturday is fish day in the Flaherty household. But what kind of fish? It varies with the catch of the day. There’s always hake and cusk-eel, usually salmon and pomfret and corvina, sometimes a whole albacore tuna being sliced into steaks. It took some research to figure out what was what, as the fish here are not the same as what one finds in the market in California. There’s also a lot of misinformation. For instance, most foreigners will tell you that congrio is conger eel (it’s not; it’s cusk-eel) and corvina is Chilean seabass (it’s not; it’s a local fish called corvina in English, too). And in a recent article on the culinary scene in Valparaíso, the author claims to have eaten a perfectly cooked grouper—which can’t possibly be right, since there is no grouper in Chile. That last little slip-up led me to research the fish varieties in Chile more thoroughly. Some time ago, I found a list of all commercial fish in Chile, compiled by the National Fishing Service (www.sernapesca.cl, but my original link to the list no longer works). I recently used this list to cross-reference the genus and species at www.fishbase.org. Here’s a list of the main fish varieties sold in Chilean markets, with their local names and English translations.

Albacora: swordfish
Alfonsino: splendid alfonsino (I’ve never actually seen this in the market, but I love the name splendid alfonsino)
Anguila: snake eel
Apañado: grape-eye seabass
Atún aleta amarilla: yellowfin tuna
Atún aleta larga: albacore tuna
Azulejo: blue shark
Bacalao de profundidad or mero chileno: Chilean seabass (there’s also a Bacalao de Juan Fernández, which is Hapuka in English)
Blanquillo: tilefish
Bonito: eastern Pacific bonito
Cachurreta or barrilete: skipjack tuna
Cojinoba: palm ruff (there’s also a cojinoba del sur, which is white warehou, but palm ruff is more common)
Congrio: cusk-eel (congio colorado is red cusk-eel, dorado is pink, and negro is black)
Corvina: corvina (native to the Chilean and Peruvian pacific)
Dorado (or dorado de altura): common dolphinfish
Corvinilla: a species in the croaker family
Jurel: Inca scad (in the mackerel family)
Lenguado: flounder (not sole—there is no true sole in Chile)
Lisa: flathead mullet
Merluza: hake
Mero: Chilean sea bass (in Spain, mero is grouper, but not in Chile)
Palometa (sometimes vidriola): yellowtail amberjack
Pejerrey: silverside
Raya: filetail fanskate
Reineta: Southern rays bream (in the pomfret family, so I just call it pomfret)
Róbalo: Patagonian blennie
Rococo: Peruvian banded croaker
Salmón: farmed Atlantic salmon
Salmón trucha: literally salmon trout, either rainbow or sea trout
Sierra: snoek (sometimes called sea pike in the US; escolier in France)
Tollo: speckled smooth-hound (in the houndshark family)
Vieja (sometimes mulata): no English equivalent; native to the Chilean Pacific